"Niko had raised me from birth. And he'd been on my ass since birth as well. Okay, a bit of an exaggeration, but close enough. Pick up your clothes, do your homework, stop drawing cheat notes on your arm, eat your vegetables, quit trying to make out the porn through the scrambled gray zig-zags lines. I was in my twenties now, so it was a little different. Run your five miles in the morning. Spar two hours in the afternoon. Study up on how to kill F through H in the Mythological Creature Compendium. Quit trying to make out the porn through the scrambled gray zig-zag lines.

Well, some things never change. And porn channels were expensive.

Niko had come a long way in those six months. Although for all of them he would wake up in the middle of the night and stand in the doorway to my bedroom, making sure it wasn't a dream. Making sure I was alive. Not that I'd actually had caught him doing it. I didn't have to. I knew.The illusion was my brother seeing me dead. The reality was that my brother would've torn the world apart if that illusion had been true."

Saturday, February 27, 2010

"Around about then, both Isaac and I formed the habit of visiting science-fiction editors in their offices. Isaac concentrated on a single one, John Campbell, who had recently replaced F. Orlin Tremaine as editor of Astounding.

What Isaac did was write an actual story, leave it with Campbell and come back a month later to get the rejected manuscript (which he then mailed off to Amazing Stories, who bought it right away), along with a thirty-minute lecture on what Isaac did wrong and what he should have done right. So Isaac wrote a second story, trying to do it as Campbell had described. That got the same treatment; bounce with lecture from Campbell, acceptance by Amazing. And the third story was the charm. It was accepted by Campbell, as were scores of others over the next decades."

"When I first began obsessively reading science fiction, at about the age of ten, all sf writers were as gods to me. Some, however, were bigger gods than others, my holiest trinity being Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. G. Wells and Edward Elmer Smith, Ph. D. — with Doc Smith at the top of the heap because he was the one who wrote the Skylark novels.

In those days, I couldn’t afford the exorbitant cover price of an sf magazine, which could run as much as 25¢ apiece. I got my fixes in a second-hand magazine store. These were Depression days, remember, and there were second-hand everything stores all over the place. There the magazines might sell for a dime, and the storekeeper would buy them back from you for a nickel when you were through if you liked. (But what fan would sell off parts of his collection?) The trouble with getting your magazines that way was that you spotted issues you hadn’t read in no particular order in the bins, which was an annoyance when you were reading serials."

"For a while, H. Beam Piper was one of the clients of my literary agency in the late 1950s. He had first attracted attention with his story “He Walked Around the Horses,” about a man who, having done that, apparently disappeared into another reality. But perhaps he is best known for his successful “Little Fuzzy” stories"

"The way I met Isaac Asimov was the way I met almost everybody else who became not only important to me as a teenager but a lifelong friend. Like every other kid in the world, I met a lot of other kids in those years from, say, 14 to 19 — in school, in the neighborhood, in the YCL, in the (don’t laugh) Olivet Presbyterian Church Thursday afternoon teenagers’ class, which I attended until I was 17. But those friends came and went and were gone, while many of the ones I met through fandom were friends all their lives — Isaac, Damon Knight, Cyril Kornbluth, Dirk Wylie, Dick Wilson. In fact, there are one or two — Jack Robins, Dave Kyle — whom I still count as friends, seventy-odd years later, although none of us are very mobile these days and it’s been a while since we got together. "

"The stranger’s face was hidden beneath wet bandages. Only his eyes were visible, but they were covered by a pair of aviator goggles. He wore a hooded yellow poncho and his feet, legs and waist were covered by a pair of green rubber waders. His voice, guttural and angry, was a man’s. Smoke still curled from the barrel of the shotgun in his hands, and water dripped from the stock.

"Count Brass, Lord Guardian of Kamarg, rode out on a horned horse onemorning to inspect his territories. He rode until he came to a littlehill, on the top of which stood a ruin of immense age. It was the ruinof a Gothic church whose walls of thick stone were smooth with thepassing of winds and rains. Ivy clad much of it, and the ivy was ofthe flowering sort so that at this season purple and amber blossomsfilled the dark windows, in place of the stained glass that had oncedecorated them.

His rides always brought Count Brass to the ruin. He felt a kind offellowship with it, for, like him, it was old; like him, it hadsurvived much turmoil, and, like him, it seemed to have beenstrengthened rather than weakened by the ravages of time. The hill onwhich the ruin stood was a waving sea of tall, tough grass, moved bythe wind. The hill was surrounded by the rich, seemingly infinitemarshlands of Kamarg—a lonely landscape populated by wild white bulls,horned horses, and giant scarlet flamingoes so large they could easilylift a grown man."

"The gate is torn from its hinges. The men with spears and axes aresurrounding my house. They're in the garden, stealing fruit from myorange tree. But the oranges are not orange, they're green, greenstill. They're not ripe enough to eat!"

"SFS: What made Black Library go the Print on Demand route? What arethe implications of the print-on-demand method?

CD: Over the past ten years we've published over 300 novels. Add tothat the hundreds of short stories and dozens of comic books, graphicnovels, art books and background books and it equals enough titles tofill several shelves of the SF/F section of the average bookstore.Obviously, it's not practical to keep that many titles in print at anyone time - the BL editorial office would have to double up as a bookwarehouse and, as much as we love being surrounded by books, thousandsof copies of hundreds of different titles might be considered a firerisk! PoD is the perfect solution. No warehouses full of books butpotential access to our entire"

"He did, however, mention your repeated absences. And the failing markyou got on your last essay."

"That's because Beeson made me write it on this book, The ImpendingThreat of Time Travel, and it was total rubbish. It said time traveltheory's rot, and historians do affect events, that they've beenaffecting them all along, but we haven't been able to see it yetbecause the space-time continuum's been able to cancel out thechanges. But it won't be able to forever, so we need to stop sendinghistorians to the past immediately and—"

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

"I’ve had several exchanges of emails lately with Wenllian “Billee” Stallings, daughter of the late, great Will F. Jenkins who, under the pen name of Murray Leinster, was one of the people who built the genre of science fiction. As David Hartwell recently observed, “In a parallel world, Murray Leinster is as famous as Robert A. Heinlein."

Billee and her sister Jo-An Evans are currently at work on a memoir of the creator of the parallel worlds story and author of the first “first contact” story (which was titled, appropriately enough, “First Contact”), and in the hope that I might provide an otherwise undocumented bit of tid (and thus a mention in their book), I started jotting down my memories of my one brief encounter with Mr. Jenkins."

"In the center of the machine were two oblong, dull silver shapes side by side, about six inches long and two wide. They bore Department of Defense asset tags. I’d heard rumors about such blocks, but I’d never seen any. They were petabyte memory blocks, one quadrillion bytes each, two to the fiftieth power, all of it static, immune to accidental loss. The document the man was writing couldn’t have needed a fraction of that memory, but what ever he was writing about must have. It was an amount of memory used to solve the mysterious equations of chaos, or to simulate the interactions of ge ne tics or particle physics. The blocks would have cost millions each. "

"He turned his horse toward the streets. As he did so his ears caught a faint sound from above. He looked upward, his eyes searching the sky, certain that he recognized the sound. At last he saw it—a distant black shape in the air overhead. Then sun­light .ashed on metal, and the sound became distinct, a clank­ing and whirring of giant bronze wings. Hawkmoon’s heart sank.The thing descending from the sky was unmistakably an or­nate ornithopter, wrought in the shape of a gigantic condor, enameled in blue, scarlet, and green. No other nation on Earth possessed such vessels. It was a .ying machine of the Dark Em­pire of Granbretan.Now Oladahn’s disappearance was fully explained. The war­riors of the Dark Empire were present in Soryandum. It was more than likely, too, that they had recognized Oladahn and knew that Hawkmoon could not be far away. And Hawkmoon was the Dark Empire’s most hated opponent. "

'"Flash priority message to all Internal Security posts. Message begins: Traitors to the Clan have activated Plan Blue without authorization. Any security officers in possession of special weapons are to secure and disarm them immediately. Anyone not in possession but with knowledge of the disposition of special weapons must report to me immediately. Use of lethal force to secure and disarm special weapons in the possession of unauthorized parties is approved." Riordan swallowed and shifted his grip on the cell phone. "Anyone who is unaware of Plan Blue or the nature of the special weapons—you should execute Plan Black immediately. I repeat, Plan Black, immediate effect. Order ends. Please copy.""

“Making some 40,000,000 people,” Gortman says. “Or somewhat more than the entire human population of Venus. Remarkable!”

“And this isn’t the biggest constellation, not by any means!” Mattern’s voice rings with pride. “Sansan is bigger, and so is Boshwash! And there are several larger ones in Europe—Berpar, Wienbud, I think two others. With more being planned!” "

Monday, February 22, 2010

"You might ask, gentle Reader, how this firecracker-barrel of a disaster-waiting-to-happen came about? how a proper high-ranking British aristocrat family and respectable grand estate got embroiled in such a peculiar Cursed, dreadful, and dangerous situation?

Well indeed, you might ask. And the answer to this mystery is:—

There was among them one mummy, or rather, a Mummy, the grandest of them all, in a splendid golden sarcophagus, stored in the little room right next to Fanny’s tiny bedroom. It had been the very first of the many acquisitions, and has been in fact the only item that Lady Bertram did not order and pursue herself. A distinguished Egyptologist, with a slew of references, including a glowing letter from her absolute authority of authorities, Georg Ebers, had asked if he could take up her one-time casual and kind offer of storage in order to temporarily house a splendid find destined for the collection of the British Museum, that was to be sorted and catalogued in due time, but for the moment it needed a discreet and clandestine place to stay, and what lovelier than the loveliest Mansfield Park? He was in the neighborhood, one could see, and it was terribly obliging of Her Ladyship to offer generous hospitality to the venerable bit of the Ancient Past in her very own safe and dry and secure attic.

Charmed and flattered into immediate acquiescence, Lady Bertram agreed. The shipment of a great crate followed. It was dutifully taken upstairs. The Egyptologist was wined and dined, and then made his excuses and soon disappeared, with an abundance of promises of contacting her as soon as progress was made with the museum bureaucracy, at which point the precious find would be relocated to its final destination. But—that was the last they heard of the Egyptologist.[3]

It is only right and proper that Penguin has reissued the Modesty Blaise novels under the name of Retro Revival as the books are the ultimate celebration of the swinging sixties. The first novel, simply called Modesty Blaise, which was first published in 1965, abounds in detailing that is just so 1960s."

[Anyone in India that could get these for me, I am open to negotiations, or bribes, etc. :) Cash, goods, whatever.]

"“Of course more babies die here. More babies are born. Can’t you understand that? Just as many die in Ombu. You said yourself they are experts at this. They know how to stem the blood.” “They’d better not use spiderwebs. That’s all. I don’t want those on me.” “No, I asked. They use shredded coconut fibre. You’ll be fine. You’re eating better than you’ve ever eaten. You’ll be fine.”"

"I'm a bit grumpy at the moment 'cos I took what I thought was a Red Priest novel to the ROR group, and they promptly -- and very correctly -- pointed out that it was two novels. That irritated the hell out of me, because I really wanted to stay away from the Big Trilogy format. I like stand-alone books. Sure, I like persistent characters and universes, but I like character-driven tales, and the Grand Epic Trilogy Plotlines rarely seem to hinge on the kind of textured, fascinating character work of my favourite genre writers.

In any case, there's one for you: not one, but two Red Priest novels. They'll stand alone, but as a matter of course, the first will lead directly to the events of the second. After that? Ah, hell -- ideas are cheap. Time is expensive. I'll see what I can put together, eh?"

"Having already written a first person series (Parrish Plessis), it was a very conscious decision to go to third person, multiple viewpoint. Primarily, I wanted to challenge myself, having never written novels this way before, and secondarily, I wanted it to be different from the Parrish series. First person can be very limiting, and many subtleties are lost. I wanted Sentients to be complex and nuanced and tricky. I have to say that I got what I asked for, and the story has pushed me in all sorts of ways. The world building itself was instinctive and pleasurable. I’ve always believed that in the far future, some things will remain the same and others will be unrecognizable. What makes your worlds/galaxy/universe unique is the choices you make at that very bottom line."

"Well, I really do want to entertain people. I very much hope that my stories always function well as stories, and that they take the reader on an interesting journey. That's a top concern for me. But yeah, I have other agendas as well. I also hope the stories cause people to reflect on their present and perhaps pay close attention to the world around them. I see interesting trends all around me, every day, and one of the things I'd like my fiction to do is to provide readers with my lens on our present, so that they can take a look through that glass as well. The fact that the stories sometimes present bleak futures.... well, if we don't want a bleak future, one hopes that we'll stop building it. From my personal perspective, I'm not really seeing a huge shift in the way we organize our economies or our societies for sustainability, so my suspicion is that while we aren't doomed yet, we are apparently bent on dooming ourselves."

"“You stink of magic.” The thing’s voice was a raspy, grating whisper, as if its throat were filled with gravel or dirt.

“And you stink of blood and offal.”

“Indeed. And now I’ll add yours to the stench, little thing, as well as the blood and innards of those behind you.”

“You can try, but I warn you—these two are under my protection. You will fail.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You are weak. You may know the art, but that will not save you.”

“That remains to be seen.” Levi struggled to keep his voice calm and his expression serene. “Tell me, whom do I have the honor of addressing?”

“So polite, you are. I’m impressed. Most of these creatures have simply run away from me, or screamed, or tried in vain to fight back, but you seek dialogue. You, sir, are a gentleman. Since you asked politely, My name is Samuel.”"

"The woman slid into trance. She went fast and deep, while Adam’s jaw dropped. In Suzanne’s office, the portable fMRI would have shown the brain’s activity profoundly altered: the anterior cingulate diminished, the precuneus nucleus in spectacular, multicoloured overdrive on the monitor display. Even to an untrained observer like Adam, the effect was obvious. He remained riveted as Suzanne completed the induction, taking the woman back in time, inside her mind, to situations where she felt secure; and each time the state was at its deepest, Suzanne touched the woman’s shoulder.“Now in the whirlwind, step outside yourself, like watching a screen, then drain the colour out and push the image off into the distance–” Recoding the recent memory to remove trauma, then using the shoulder pressure to trigger confidence and calm, she left an instruction for ongoing improvement in the woman’s life – “Just fixing the problem isn’t good enough,” her teachers used to say, “so leave them better than before, better than they thought possible” – before leading her back to normal consciousness. “And you can come awake as I count backwards. Ten, nine…” Finally she snapped her fingers, and the woman’s eyes snapped open. “My God.” “Bloody hell,” said Adam.""

"‘Not at rush hour I can’t. We wait for another van, smear’s going to start attracting a crowd and smelling bad. Seagulls are already taking an interest. Sorry, Cultel, but it looks like you’re going to have to suck it up and earn some overtime.’

‘Fine. But I was serious about being loaded. You’d better get another van to meet us, case we have to move some stiffs around.’

‘I’ll see what I can do. Call in when you’ve peeled it off the concrete; we’ll start the paperwork at this end.’

‘Copy,’ Cultel said.

‘And watch your step out there, boys. It’s a long way down, and I don’t want to have to call Steamville and tell them they need to deal with a couple of smears of their own.’

In the clean-up van, Cultel clicked off his handset and hung it back under the dashboard. He turned to his partner, Gerber, who was digging through a paper bag to reach the last doughnut. ‘You get all that?’

"2. Back in the 2007 Snapshot, you said (and I quote :-):‘After over 25 SF and F novels for adults, young adults and kids, maybe it's time for me to step away from the genre and try something a little more in line with my other reading habits. Crime and thrillers are my other love, so that could be fun. I've also been thinking about doing a PhD. Maybe it's time to start slowing down a tad and see where life takes me, rather than the other way around’.With 2010 marking publication of your 30th novel, do you think you’ve slowed down since then? Has you direction changed?

Far from slowing down, this month I’ve actually sped up. Right this second I’m writing 3500 words a day in order to meet a deadline, and I have six titles out this year. I have some TV stuff lurking in the wings, plus a new series sold and underway, and a couple of more at the drafting stage. But I’m hopeful that, after March, the pace should slip a bit. (I’ve just picked up a bit of RSI, so it’ll have to.)

As far as genre goes, I was indeed thinking of jumping across to crime novels and thrillers. That dream might have to stay in the drawer for another year or two, but I am doing the PhD. I started that in 2008, and I hate not finishing things.

You’ll probably see less space opera from me in the coming years, but that’s all I’d better say at the moment. In three more years, I’ll probably be proven wrong again!"

"Here's to us then," she responded. "And to guts. You're dumb and delightful, but you do something to me I'd forgotten could be done. And maybe I'll change my mind even if you don't have the price. I think I'll kiss you. Big Ed is still a louse, and not only in the ring. He thinks he can out-wrestle me but I know all the nasty holds. I play for keeps or not at all. Keep away from me, kid."

Denver's imagination had caught fire. Under the combined stimuli of Darbor and Snowgrape Champagne, he seemed to ascend to some high, rarified, alien dimension where life became serene and uncomplicated. A place where one ate and slept and made fortunes and love, and only the love was vital. He smoldered.

Saturday, February 20, 2010

"2. What would we have seen published by Lee Battersby since the last Snapshot? What achievements are you most proud of since then?

I’ve not published a huge amount, to be honest. A lot of my time has been taken up with working on the new novel, and writing a screenplay for a film adaptation of Lyn’s short story The Memory of Breathing, which is under development with a Sydney-based production company. I’ve had a few small-press pieces published, as well as a story in the Jack Dann-edited anthology Dreaming Again. My favourite piece, however, would be Claws of Native Ghosts, an 11 000 word horror story set in the early days of the Western Australian colony, which combined lycanthropy, ancient megafauna, and Aboriginal spirituality. It won the Australian Shadows Award and should be seeing print again in the upcoming Year’s Best Horror & Dark Fantasy anthology from Brimstone Press. A lot of reviews commented positively on the way I managed to portray the Aboriginal elements, and given it’s something I hear authors say they deliberately avoid, I’m pleased that I seemed to have done, if not a brilliant job, then at least not an insulting one."

Thursday, February 18, 2010

"“She has betrayed us,” Tisamon stated simply. Abruptly all expression was gone from his angular features but that was only because it had fled inward.

“There are . . . reasons,” Stenwold said, wishing to defend his absent friend and yet not turn the duellist’s anger against himself. The man’s cold, hating eyes locked on to him even so. Tisamon had taken up no weapon, but his hands alone, and the spurs of naked bone that lanced outward from his forearms, were quite enough to take Stenwold apart, and with time to spare. “Tisamon,” Stenwold said.“You don’t know . . .”

“Listen,” said Marius suddenly. And when Stenwold listened, in that very instant there was no more murmur audible from the gates.

And then it came, reaching them across the rooftops of Myna: the cry of a thousand throats. The assault had begun."

"I started working at Locus back in 1997 as part of my ultimately successful plan to woo my wife (or for her to woo me if you listen to her tell it). Working for Locus has always intimately informed what I do. The first handful of books I edited were year's bests, and they sat hand in glove with editing for and working on a magazine with a broad perspective. I think working for Locus keeps me aware of trends in publishing and makes me pay attention to what's being written in the field at a very deep level."

"As a guest lecturer at this summer's Odyssey Workshop, you'll be lecturing, workshopping, and meeting individually with students. What do you think is the most important advice you can give to developing writers?

To read constantly. I’m often taken aback by how little would-be writers actually read. We live in a post-literate world, so I guess it’s not that surprising, but still. With all due respect to Jeanne and other writing instructors, you’ll learn as much by reading critically and widely as you’ll learn in a classroom. The biggest challenge to an emerging writer is finding your own voice, and one of the ways you do that is by measuring it against those of established writers, and trying to do something different."

"I'm just your run-of-the-mill, burned-out journalist with a family, sitting late nights at the keyboard with nothing but a sick headful of dreams and a stubborn streak. I've always written along the way, since early childhood, and pursued it very intensively in my teens. I'd roll something out of the typewriter and mail it off to the New Yorker and wait for fame and fortune. I have several cardboard boxes full of old manuscripts and poems from that time. I got into music and spent ten years writing songs and damaging my hearing in a couple of original rock bands. Then I got a college degree and became serious about writing fiction, and the only relation between those two events is that I had an abiding fear that I was about to settle into an ordinary, save-for-retirement existence, and that lit a flame under me because the lifelong dream of being a writer suddenly seemed ready to dissolve."

Sunday, February 14, 2010

"SFB: What’s the biggest change you see coming in the science fiction genre?

JH: We're in the middle of a long slow change that reflects the reading public's lack of interest in science, and their concomitant ignorance of it. Hard SF is a hard sell, and a lot of writers are leaning toward fantasy. I stick with hard SF, but I'm not selling as many books as the ones about dragons and mighty-thewed heroes. "

This one has Moriarty, what more can you want? When you have the super detective himself, Sherlock Holmes, trying to get to the bottom of what his arch-nemesis, super villain Professor Moriarty is up to, the stage is set for a gripping narrative, as they try and outdo each other, and Watson tries doggedly to follow along.

This one has Moriarty, what more can you want? When you have the super detective himself, Sherlock Holmes, trying to get to the bottom of what his arch-nemesis, super villain Professor Moriarty is up to, the stage is set for a gripping narrative, as they try and outdo each other, and Watson tries doggedly to follow along.

This one has Moriarty, what more can you want? When you have the super detective himself, Sherlock Holmes, trying to get to the bottom of what his arch-nemesis, super villain Professor Moriarty is up to, the stage is set for a gripping narrative, as they try and outdo each other, and Watson tries doggedly to follow along.

This one has Moriarty, what more can you want? When you have the super detective himself, Sherlock Holmes, trying to get to the bottom of what his arch-nemesis, super villain Professor Moriarty is up to, the stage is set for a gripping narrative, as they try and outdo each other, and Watson tries doggedly to follow along.

This one has Moriarty, what more can you want? When you have the super detective himself, Sherlock Holmes, trying to get to the bottom of what his arch-nemesis, super villain Professor Moriarty is up to, the stage is set for a gripping narrative, as they try and outdo each other, and Watson tries doggedly to follow along.

This one has Moriarty, what more can you want? When you have the super detective himself, Sherlock Holmes, trying to get to the bottom of what his arch-nemesis, super villain Professor Moriarty is up to, the stage is set for a gripping narrative, as they try and outdo each other, and Watson tries doggedly to follow along.

This one has Moriarty, what more can you want? When you have the super detective himself, Sherlock Holmes, trying to get to the bottom of what his arch-nemesis, super villain Professor Moriarty is up to, the stage is set for a gripping narrative, as they try and outdo each other, and Watson tries doggedly to follow along.

This one has Moriarty, what more can you want? When you have the super detective himself, Sherlock Holmes, trying to get to the bottom of what his arch-nemesis, super villain Professor Moriarty is up to, the stage is set for a gripping narrative, as they try and outdo each other, and Watson tries doggedly to follow along.

This one has Moriarty, what more can you want? When you have the super detective himself, Sherlock Holmes, trying to get to the bottom of what his arch-nemesis, super villain Professor Moriarty is up to, the stage is set for a gripping narrative, as they try and outdo each other, and Watson tries doggedly to follow along.

This one has Moriarty, what more can you want? When you have the super detective himself, Sherlock Holmes, trying to get to the bottom of what his arch-nemesis, super villain Professor Moriarty is up to, the stage is set for a gripping narrative, as they try and outdo each other, and Watson tries doggedly to follow along.

This one has Moriarty, what more can you want? When you have the super detective himself, Sherlock Holmes, trying to get to the bottom of what his arch-nemesis, super villain Professor Moriartry is up to, the stage is set for a gripping narrative, as they try and outdo each other, and Watson tries doggedly to follow along.

This one has Moriarty, what more can you want? When you have the super detective himself, Sherlock Holmes, trying to get to the bottom of what his arch-nemesis, super villain Professor Moriarty is up to, the stage is set for a gripping narrative, as they try and outdo each other, and Watson tries doggedly to follow along.

This one has Moriarty, what more can you want? When you have the super detective himself, Sherlock Holmes, trying to get to the bottom of what his arch-nemesis, super villain Professor Moriartry is up to, the stage is set for a gripping narrative, as they try and outdo each other, and Watson tries doggedly to follow along.

This one has Moriarty, what more can you want? When you have the super detective himself, Sherlock Holmes, trying to get to the bottom of what his arch-nemesis, super villain Professor Moriarty is up to, the stage is set for a gripping narrative, as they try and outdo each other, and Watson tries doggedly to follow along.

This one has Moriarty, what more can you want? When you have the super detective himself, Sherlock Holmes, trying to get to the bottom of what his arch-nemesis, super villain Professor Moriarty is up to, the stage is set for a gripping narrative, as they try and outdo each other, and Watson tries doggedly to follow along.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

“We need you to run him, hon,” Gin said. “He’s got beyond El and me, for sure. Make him tell you about the tobacco and the gun.”

“Oh my God. Titus!”

“I should’ve brought a horsewhip,” Titus growled, but he was not really offended. As long as he was light on the bridle she would not call time on him now. Mysteriously, half an hour’s worth of backbreaking labour seemed to have solidified group opinion in his favour. He took her hand and bowed over it. “It would be a kindness to your fellow woman, Shell. Have pity on young Joan here, or Lau up in orbit. In me celibacy always leads to misogyny. Being safely married is the only sure way to keep me from becoming another Captain Bligh.”

Friday, February 12, 2010

"How much flexibility do you get when working on the Star Wars novels?

Within the confines of writing in someone else’s universe, there’s a surprising amount of flexibility. Obviously you can’t break the template. If you want to portray real science, real smugglers, real galactic politics then Star Wars isn’t for you. But if you can work in that form you’ll have a ball. I always do. I have two Star Wars novels coming out this year, and both are very different. Sometimes I’ve had to work hard to find small ways to make the books my own, such as reference comedy groups Tripod or Flight of the Conchords. Other times I email the guys in charge with questions like “Can I wipe out this entire race?” and they come straight back with “Fine, go for it!”"

“Of course it is,” Shell said warmly. “A glorioso idea. And we can cut through time on our way back to Earth as well. We could arrive only a little later than you do. Nobody will notice our detour through time and space.”

"At first stripping off the condoms was a great relief. Well rinsed in tobacco water, the head sacks repelled clogging growths. It was good to actually feel the cool damp air swishing past bare hands, and to squelch downhill confidently without a treacherous layer of plastic beneath one’s boot soles. Aloha suddenly became palpable and thus much more real — the odd sponginess of the cold wet earth, neither clayey nor sandy; the frail stringy resistance of the webby brown biofilms before he plucked them off his trouser legs or jacket sleeves. It came home to him that this was truly the unknown, an alien place. Delightful!

After some hours however the head sacks became burdensome. Aloha’s microscopic life could not destroy the plastic, but the micropores inevitably clogged. And with less surface area, every pore in the head sacks counted. The old nightmarish sensation of slow strangulation began to prey on them again. Titus yearned to rip the sack off and really breathe."

“Much sooner. The string section we’re aiming for now is way to hell and gone out by the orbit of Mars. If you change the sails as we go around the moon, if we use the new solution... we’d only need one pass around the moon.”

"But the earlier sense of amateur derives from the Latin word amator, a lover—specifically, a lover of literature, of fine wine, of rare postage stamps, of anything that can excite strong commitment, be it intellectual or emotional or both. We no longer use the word that way in English because, since it has come to take on negative connotations in its other sense, it has been replaced by its Spanish synonym, aficionado. But those of us who love science fiction are amateurs of science fiction, and I think there was no greater amateur of SF than Arthur C. Clarke, who when he was eighteen or so set out to show his love for the work of Olaf Stapledon and other SF visionaries by writing his own tale of the far future. And it is that love that shines through in Against the Fall of Night and most of Clarke’s later work and makes it compelling to us despite all its literary shortcomings."

""And once down there? People don't come back from Planetary 'Tank assignments, admiral, and I didn't spend the better part of my life studying my tail off with the toughest bastards in the galaxy to waste it on some back-system world trying to get some half-rate fool to explain a computer system he probably just happened to fall into in the first place! You're not putting me down there!""

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

"The Xeelee, of course, continue to be very important for me. In my next story I posited humans in a four-dimensional cage, put there by more powerful off-stage aliens. Eventually I realised that if I made the aliens the Xeelee, I had the beginning and the end of a future history, which grew, organically, from that point. I suspect for much of my career I'll be referring back to elements of this story."

Monday, February 08, 2010

"By the time he went inside again, Gin was steaming with ideas. “The next bouncer will have salt,” she said. “And rubbing alcohol. And the real brainwave — a microwave oven. Heating the filters should kill everything beautifully.”"

"Bogie and Bacall were open to a venture, and that was radio syndication. From an informal recording studio, they could do a radio series in a few months and have it syndicated over time by the Frederic W. Ziv Company. With Bacall, it was a package deal that was worthy of Slate Shannon, Bogie's alter ego in this series.Shannon is the owner and proprietor of a dubious Havana hotel, and Bacall is Sailor Duval, his sulty, wisecracking sidekick, whose exact status is questionable. Jester Hairston plays the calypso-singing aide-de-camp King Moses, whose witty rhymes comment on the plot as it whips along. Shannon's hotel attracts cutthroats, gamblers, and other denizens of the deep to its nautical watering hole, so Shannon is ready to do what it takes to keep the peace, or get a piece of the action."

"Their only landing shuttle was too valuable to use for drops. “The only touchdown will be for the final pickup,” the captain decreed, “when everybody and everything is ready.” Getting personnel and materiel dirtside would be quicker and more efficient with balloon bouncers. Titus had to silently remind himself that this technology was time-tested. Otherwise he would have scoffed at the idea of being shoved out of the shuttle cargo bay to land where the wind took him. But here he was, dressed in an iso-suit, climbing into a reinforced seat and strapping himself in. Foam modules inflated themselves around his head and limbs and torso, to cushion him from impact. Beside and above him, at odd angles, were his three companions, similarly secured. The tetrahedral vessel would bounce and land on one of its faces, and one or the other of them would be right-side up and in a position to help the others. All the farewells and final admonitions had been made. At the last Freddy said, “Give my regards to the hula girls and the surfer chicks, Titus. Surf’s up!”"

"But he got quite good at it. Sixteen revivals in a row could not but get one’s hand in. Levering a weak and swearing crew member out of the smelly matrix of slippery gel, hauling him or her over buck naked to the shower corner and scrubbing the gel and loose skin off — it was like grooming muddy horses, or helping a foxhound bitch to whelp puppies. By the time he was done he’d have run his hands over every square inch of nearly everyone on board. Nothing could be better calculated to promote self-discipline and quash romantic interest! He had picked up some crude barbering skills on the Terra Nova, and took over that task as well for the men. Most of the women preferred Gin to cut their hair."

"Griffith frowned at Infinity Mendez. He was not accustomed to being questioned by gardeners. Come to think of it, he was not accustomed to going to parties to which the gardeners were invited, either. It occurred to him that the starship’s extreme democracy had probably gone too far. The word “anarchy” came to mind, and gave him another opening against the expedition. "

"Feral pushed off and started interviewing people, setting the background for his story. Starfarer navigated from one star system to the next via cosmic string. But once it reached a destination, it required other methods of propulsion: primarily the sail. Cosmic string provided macronavigation, the sail, micronavigation, though it sounded strange to apply the term “micro” to distances measured in millions of kilometers.

The sail was slow, but near a star it was steady. It had the great benefit of operating without reaction mass or onboard fuel. It would propel the starship from its entrypoint into the star system to a point from which it could re-enter the twisted space-time of a cosmic string. The alien contact team had a small, fast explorer to use in traveling between Starfarer and a new system’s worlds. "

"“I love it,” J.D. said. “It looks organic, somehow. But why do it like this? Not to conserve energy, surely.” While Starfarer still flew within the solar system, the sun would provide all the power it could possibly use. Once it clamped itself to the universe’s web of cosmic string, the problem would be to keep from being overwhelmed by the energy flux. "

"The National Institue of Psionics occupies five hectares on the north side of Polar City. In the middle of the landscaped grounds stands the main building, a rambling, one-story maze of white stucco and red-tiled roofs, dim corridors and shaded patios. As a common joke goes, if you can’t find your way around the building, then you aren’t psychic enough to belong there. The Director’s office is a big book-lined room with a beamed ceiling and a red-tiled floor that overlooks a particularly cool patio where a holo fountain spreads its illusory waters in a blue-and-white tiled basin. Those who love the Institute as an alma mater — and despite Mulligan’s views on the matter, most psychics do — remember this room fondly, with its comfortable furniture of real wood and leather, its collection of fine art on the walls and its state of the art comp unit, and tend to model their own condos after it. Mulligan has, predictably, always hated it, and the Director, too, a tall, thin graying Blanco named Dane Coleman. "

"“Rye whiskey, rye whiskey, rye whiskey I cry, I got to have rye whiskey, or I sure going to die.” The three voices are singing in uncertain harmony, and they repeat this chorus over and over because, or so Lacey assumes, they’ve forgotten the rest of the words.

Some metal thing is rumbling and banging roughly in rhythm with the song, and as the three crazies turn the corner Lacey sees it’s a bright red wheelbarrow, piled high with big plastobubbles of some amber liquid — the whiskey in question, most likely. Lacey signals Sam, then steps out, laser drawn and ready, and blocks their path. Just as Sam joins her the three shriek and come to so fast a stop that the lizzie lets go the handles of the wheelbarrow, which falls back with a clang. A plastobubble bounces out and lies quivering like a live thing. "

Friday, February 05, 2010

"I started out in this business officially back in 1975. That means I’ve been at it 35 years, and don’t plan to quit.

But the business has changed. A lot.

In 1975 there were far more publishers doing science fiction: DAW was newborn. There was Ace, Ballantine, Pocket, Bantam, Warner, Belmont-Tower, Lancer, among others, and various magazines, including the venerable Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Analog."

I was very lucky. Peter McNamara, small press publisher extraordinaire of the 80s and 90s, approached Shane Dix and I to write a series in a shared world being developed by some young South Australians. That collaboration became The Unknown Soldier, my first published novel. It’s important to acknowledge just how far from ordinary this is. Shane and I had had no published novels of our own; we had never written a novel together before; the whole thing could have been a terrible fiasco. "

Thursday, February 04, 2010

"He had been dead, he realized, those seventeen years. Only Stenwold’s return and the discovery of Tynisa had awoken him to some kind of half-life, but beneath it all some part of him had slumbered on. Until Felise. He had not known who she was, what her purpose, or her allegiance. He had not needed to, and would not have cared if she had served a Spider lady or been a slave of the Arcanum, or even worn the black and gold. Skill spoke a language all its own and, when he had fought her, even as her blade drove for his heart, he had thrilled to it. If she had killed him, as well she might, then he would have cried out in joy as her sword ran him through."

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

"This study analyzes works of cyberpunk literature written between 1981 and 2005, and positions women’s cyberpunk as part of a larger cultural discussion of feminist issues. It traces the origins of the genre, reviews critical reactions, and subsequently outlines the ways in which women’s cyberpunk altered genre conventions in order to advance specifically feminist points of view. Novels are examined within their historical contexts; their content is compared to broader trends and controversies within contemporary feminism, and their themes are revealed to be visible reflections of feminist discourse at the end of the twentieth century. The study will ultimately make a case for the treatment of feminist cyberpunk as a unique vehicle for the examination of contemporary women’s issues, and for the analysis of feminist science fiction as a complex source of political ideas. "

'In this thesis I argue that science fiction is not a genre exclusively made up of written texts but a community or series of communities. I examine the science fiction community's engagement with questions of femeninity, masculinity, sex and sexuality over the past seventy years, that is from 1926 until 1996. My examination of this engagement is centred on the battle of the sexes, the lives of James Tiptree, Jr. and the Award named in Tiptree's honour. I make connections between contemporary feminist science fiction and the earliest pulp science fiction engagements with sex and sexuality.'

Monday, February 01, 2010

"And the ten or twelve bits of margarine had been a reaction in their turn, to the loss of Shell. Ah, Shell. She had been in no way a reasonable choice, but a quite different thing. Some primal reflex, far down in the back core of his skull where the brain met the spine, had snapped into play. He had made a deliberate effort to put the entire meteoric episode out of mind — reminiscing about past passions ill behooved a married man, after all. But divorce absolved him from marriage vows. In his current situation it could do no harm. He drifted deeper into artificial slumber, riding across an endless dream prairie beside Shell in the perpetual sunshine, where it was warm, warm at last..."

He had to grin. “My own morale is vastly enhanced by a gun — I even have a license for it. And we’ll be in coldsleep most of the way. I solemnly assure you, that one can get by with much less in the way of reading matter than you’d believe possible.”

Lau’s voice was flat with astonishment. “Your personal equipment will be nothing but a gun.”

“And ammunition.” He decided not to mention his pipe and tobacco at this juncture, or the flask of brandy that there might possibly be space for. Never get ahead of the horse at the jump!

“I change my mind,” Lau announced, glancing at the captain. “This I have to see.”

The captain said, “Surely to God everyone can’t bring firearms.”

“Definitely not,” Titus said. “I’d suggest as wide a range of armament as possible, so that we’d have a chance of having one effective weapon.”"

"Helpless in the face of fate, he threw off helplessness. For the first time he was able to seize the scheme of things, to shake the baseline into the shape it had to take, speaking not with persuasion or pleading but as a flat statement of fact. “What is it the Frogs say? Not good-bye, but au revoir: to meet again. This is not over.”

“Oh, you stubborn, persuasive son of a gun.” Her voice trembled, and she lurched to her feet before, he realized, the tears came. “No, it’s not over. We’ll meet again.” He rose with her, holding onto her hand, hardly daring to believe his ears. “Oh, and Titus? A word to the wise — don’t call natives of France Frogs, okay?”"

"Beside him Lash yawned. “You mean spy satellites? That’s entirely a different thing from the Global Positioning System. I suppose it’s theoretically possible to view one person, but I’ve never heard of such a thing. It would be more trouble than it’s worth. Those things are expensive to build and orbit, you know. It’s more profitable to search for minerals, or do weather and military observations, than pick on individuals. The GPS charges for every position they track, which is why it’s only for emergencies. Why do you ask?”

“It was in Buck Rogers, and I wondered if it was fact or fiction.” As simple as that!"

"Titus sighed. “I didn’t want to believe it. But the hateful idea made so much sense, accounted for so many things. I never knew how important privacy was to me, until I came here and lost it. The way everyone knows my name, my history, my business! And this was all of a piece with it.”

“But you are a historical personage,” Rev. Pollard pointed out.

“I know, curse it. Figures of history have no privacy. I wasn’t, before. I was obscure, a nobody.”"